How to Fix Slow-Loading of Icons in Windows

Ever wondered how Windows loads the massive amounts of folder/file icons you have stored in the file explorer? Well, it doesn’t actually load up the icons from scratch. Whenever your Windows machine feels fancy, it downloads the icons of your various files and folders and saves it in the cache memory. The next few times you launch any folder, Windows doesn’t have to rebuild the icon, it just has to reload it from the cache memory.

Sometimes, Windows gets rid of this cache memory, and with it are gone all of your pre-loaded icons. This is the reason why you need to wait for some time or even refresh to get all of them back. Much worse, if you have a lot of files and folders, Windows takes a good second to load all of them, and this might be a huge problem for some people who need the seamless experience they’ve paid for. Well, we have a fix for you.

You can speed up or fix the slow loading Windows icons by a simple registry hack. By increasing the allocated cache for the icons for folders and files, you can get rid of this frustrating issue. In this procedure, we will be doing it manually, so that you do not accidentally bump up the value of any other setting. Let’s get started.

Fix Slow-Loading of Icons in Windows

You need to open the Registry Editor first. To do so, open the Start menu, and enter ‘regedit‘, and press enter. If asked for any administrator rights, allow it all the permissions.

While in the editor, use the left search bar to navigate to the following location :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Rather than editing a pre-fixed value, this time, you need to create a new one. To do so, click on New > String Value. Name the new value ‘Max Cached Icons‘.

Once done, you need to edit the value. By default, it is set at 500 Kb, which is pretty low. You can try experimenting it a bit, and find the setting that is best for you. For us, 4096 Kb looked like a good idea, so we went ahead, changed the value, and restarted our PC.

That’s pretty much it for this nifty little trick that can boost your productivity a ton. If you have any queries whatsoever regarding this article, feel free to refer us in the comments section down below.